For several years, the issue of tripartite nuclear submarine cooperation, known as AUKUS, between Australia, United Kingdom and the United States of America has been a matter of serious concern to the international community as it is believed to pose grave risks to the NPT regime and to the functioning of the IAEA Secretariat.

Finally, after much urging of the Board of Governors, the Direcor-General of IAEA has presented his written report on the subject.

Regrettably, the report is seriously flawed because it avoids some fundamental requirements of such cooperation. For example, the report does not even mention the NPT as the law whose provisions must be complied with, nor does the report talk about the prerequisite question of whether or not nuclear material is involved and if so the nature of such material. In addition, the Director-General has concluded in the report that Article 14 on exclusions of Australia’s CSA with the Agency would apply directly to the trilateral nuclear submarine cooperation. By making such a conclusion, the Director-General has not only misled the Member States but also overstepped his resposibilities.

In response, the spokesperson of the Chinese permanent mission in Vienna gave the following opinion:

All CSAs are derived from the NPT, which is an iron-clad fact and cannot be tampered with. The Director-General’s report does exactly that by severing the subordinate relationship of CSAs to the NPT and by trying to justify the nuclear proliferation behavior of the three countries through Article 14 of Australia’s CSA. Such an effort without any reference to the NPT is untenable in terms of procedure, substance and jurisprudence. Otherwise, the trilateral nuclear submarine cooperation risks turning the safeguards system into an "umbrella" for nuclear proliferation.

In China’s view, Article 14 on exclusions of Australia’s CSA does not apply to nuclear proliferation activities. No CSA or AP, as customary international law, can override or contradict, much less challenge the status of the NPT as parent law.

Moreover, the trilateral nuclear submarine cooperation is, to begin with, not a safeguards approach issue, but rather a legality issue of whether illegal transfer of weapons-grade nuclear material is involved in the cooperation. This is the core and crux of the whole issue.

The trilateral cooperation involves the original sin, namely, the transfer of weapons-grade nuclear material from NWSs to an NNWS, which is an outright act of nuclear proliferation. It is fundamentally different from indigenous development of naval nuclear propulsion in countries such as Brazil. The tripartite cooperation not only goes beyond the existing CSAs, but also directly contradicts Articles I and II of the NPT. Therefore, it is misleading to claim that Article 14 of CSA applies to the trilateral cooperation.

China urges the three countries to stop their nuclear proliferation behavior immediately and calls upon the Director-General to submit impartial and objective reports on the trilateral nuclear submarine cooperation.

China also calls on all IAEA Members to advance both in the Board of Governors and the General Conference the intergovernmental discussion process adopted by consensus four times in order to keep the spotlight focused on the true nature of the trilateral cooperation. Only thus would it be possible to defend the NPT, preserve the international nuclear non-proliferation system and maintain international peace, stability and security in any real sense.